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The Interracial Sublime: Gender and Race in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya

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The Interracial Sublime: Gender and Race in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya Instructions for authors, subscriptions and further details: http://generos.hipatiapress.com The Interracial Sublime: Gender and Race in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya Pramod K. Nayar1 1) The University of Hyderabad. India Date of publication: October 25th, 2013 Edition period: October 2013-June 2014 To cite this article: Nayar, P.K. (2013). The Interracial Sublime: Gender and Race in Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya. Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies, 2(3), 233-254. doi: 10.4471/generos.2013.28 To link this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.447/generos.2013.28 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE The terms and conditions of use are related to the Open Journal System and to Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). GÉNEROS –Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies Vol. 2 No. 3 October 2013 pp. 233-254 The Interracial Sublime: Gender and Race in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya Pramod K. Nayar The University of Hyderabad Abstract This essay argues that Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) presents an interracial sublime in the form of the dissolution of the European home/family. Dacre, I suggest, traces this dissolution to the European woman’s assertion of agency by stepping outside spatial, familial, racial and sexual boundaries. In the first section it examines the crisis of European domesticity where the family and the parent/s fail in their responsibilities toward the children. In section two I suggest that within the dissolving home/family we see the European woman, Victoria, subverting further the dissolution. The arrival of the Moor within the house compounds the blurring of hierarchies and ordering. In the final section I trace the features of the interracial sublime. I conclude by proposing that Dacre’s interracial sublime serves the purpose of demonstrating the permeability of European borders – a permeability that wreaks disaster. Dacre’s tale therefore ultimately functions as a caution against the woman’s emancipated and agential actions. Keywords: Dacre, Zofloya, sublime, interracial, gender, agency, domesticity 2013 Hipatia Press ISSN: 2014-3613 DOI: 10.4471/generos.2013.28 GÉNEROS –Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies Vol. 2 No. 3 October 2013 pp. 233-254 La Sublime Interracial: Género y raza en Zofloya de Charlotte Dacre Pramod K. Nayar The University of Hyderabad Resumen Este ensayo argumenta que Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya (1806) presenta una sublime interracial en forma de disolución de la casa / familia europea. Sugiero que Dacre traza esta disolución a la afirmación a la agencia de la mujer europea por salirse de los límites espaciales , familiar , racial y sexual. En la primera sección se analiza la crisis de la domesticidad Europea , donde la familia y el padre / s no cumplen con sus responsabilidades para con los niños. En la segunda sección sugiero que dentro de la disolución de la casa / familia vemos a la mujer europea, Victoria, subvertir aún más la disolución. La llegada de los moros dentro de la casa agrava la difuminación de las jerarquías y el orden. En la sección final trazo las características de lo sublime interracial . Concluyo proponiendo que la sublime interracial de Dacre sirve al propósito de demostrar la permeabilidad de las fronteras europeas - una permeabilidad que da rienda suelta al desastre. El cuento de Dacre, por lo tanto, en última instancia funciona como una advertencia contra las acciones emancipadoras y de agencia de la mujer. Palabras clave: Dacre, Zofloya, sublime, interracial, género, agencia, domesticidad. 2013 Hipatia Press ISSN: 2014-3613 DOI: 10.4471/generos.2013.28 235 Pramod K. Nayar – The Interracial Sublime harlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor (1806) has seen a major revival within Gothic and gender studies. Distinguished critics such C as Diane Hoeveler (1997), EJ Clery (2000), Anne Mellor (2002), among others, have examined the sexual, racial, gender and aesthetic politics of the novel and debated its feminist (or not) ideology. My own argument here is that, like other cases of the ‘Empire Gothic’ (Davison, 2003, 2009), Dacre’s Zofloya is concerned with the permeability of the English/European home to the advent/invasion of the racial Other. Zofloya instantiates the English Romantics’ cosmopolitan and transnational interests and concerns (see Fay & Richardson, 1997), concerns that often manifest in the form of anxieties over influences, impacts and cultural encounters. This is not new to the Romantic age. James I in his Counter blasted to Tobacco (1604) had warned of the pernicious influence of the New World product to English bodies and minds. John Donne’s ‘Elegy 11: The Bracelet’, argued a case against foreign coins and currency that, according to Donne, damage English economy and habits. Foreign products like tea are cause for concern over national character. William Congreve’s The Double Dealer satirizes women who drink tea as the ladies retire to ‘tea and scandal, according to their ancient custom’. This suggests that the entire ritual of women’s tea-drinking and gossip marked a disruption of quiet, quiescent English domesticity (Kowaleski-Wallace, 1994, p. 132). John Gay’s ‘To a Lady on Her Passion for Old China’ mocked the craze for chinoi serie and china among the English upper and even middle classes (Porter, 1999, 2002; Chang, 2010). While these instances precede Dacre’s text, the tradition of the literature of anxiety over foreignness would gather strength with the Gothic, the adventure tale and the horror story. Thus in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone revolves around the corruption and disaster that arrives in an English house as a result of the precious stone, whose origins are in India. We therefore need to see Dacre’s novel as engaging with a national theme: of the invasion and slow erosion of Englishness through England’s transnational exchanges and role in global trade. However, it is not the nation qua nation– although it might be argued that the home or family serves as a metaphor or functional equivalent of the nation – but the domestic realm that is under immediate threat from the racial Other in the novel. Although Dacre presents, towards the end of the tale, the Moor as Satan in human form, the metaphysical dimension does GÉNEROS –Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies, 2(3) 236 little to alter our interpretation of the black man’s role in the ruination of the European home through the character of Victoria. The novel, I propose, moves outward from the home/family to interracial horror. The ‘interracial sublime’, as I see it, is the horror of a European family’s dissolution due to an interracial sexual relation, invited and initiated by the European woman who asserts sexual agency, and which climaxes in the annihilation of the European woman. Thus Dacre’s interracial sublime, in a truly Burke (1757) an sense, is beyond borders and boundaries, is about transgression and excess, and is ultimately a moral tale about the dangers of the European woman leaving home and family. In order to examine the theme of transnational transgression in the novel I unravel three interrelated discourses, each being the subject of one section in the essay. The first discourse is of domesticity wherein Dacre presents the European home and family and its eventual collapse. This discourse is, I shall demonstrate, is intertwined with the discourse of intrusion and foreignness where the house/family is itself in the grip of a dynamic libidinal economy. The second discourse is of in-between zones and borders. This discourse, I argue, locates the protagonists on the margins – of home and family. As Dacre’s discourse of spaces begins to present a borderlessness, it merges with the aesthetic discourse of the sublime, and this is the third major discourse of the novel. The aesthetics of terror, awe, borderlessness (of space but also of race and ethnicity) generate the novel’s interracial sublime, I demonstrate in the third section. The essay has three sections. In the first I examine the European domestic scene as Dacre presents it. Section Two examines the border zones wherein Dacre maps Victoria’s movement toward the interracial relation that would eventually prove to be her nemesis. In the final section I turn to the interracial sublime in all its aspects. The Crisis of European Domesticity Set in fifteenth century Venice and its neighborhood, Zofloya is a novel about European domesticity and its slow erosion. I argue that Dacre is upholding a certain ideology of familial domesticity where particular virtues of fidelity, parenting and discipline are seen as constitutive of a ‘good 237 Pramod K. Nayar – The Interracial Sublime home’. In the novel the tragic and evil events involving the interracial encounter are attributed to the collapse of the European home. The novel opens with the house and family of Marchese di Loredani, married to Laurina who is initially described as ‘a female of unexampled beauty’ (p. 3), whose one ‘foible’ was a ‘great … thirst of admiration’ (p. 3). But we are also told that the couple lived a near-perfect life. His ‘ardent love appeared to suffer no diminution’ and, since ‘no temptations crossed her path – it required … no effort to be virtuous’ (p. 4). They have two children. The daughter, Victoria, is ‘proud, haughty and self-sufficient … wild, irrepressible … indifferent to reproof, careless of censure … of an implacable, revengeful, and cruel nature, and bent upon gaining the ascendency in whatever she engaged’ (p. 4). The son, Leonardo, is ‘violent and revengeful’. Dacre points to faulty motherhood – and, by extension, the dysfunctional family – when she describes these as ‘ill-regulated’ (p. 4). It is the absence of a proper parenting and pedagogy, suggests Dacre, that results in such children: Such were the children whom early education had tended equally to corrupt; and such were the children, whom to preserve from future depravity, required the most vigilant care, aided by such brilliant examples of virtue and decorum as should induce the desire of emulation.
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